


Untitled 08

by losselen (zambla)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Experimental, M/M, Other, So AU it hurts, Werebird, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 12:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1510463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/losselen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Werebirds and the autobiographical Remus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untitled 08

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2005.

I have only two memories. Poignant as they are, only two.  
  
When I was five I killed a bird. The mechanism of its death is as hazy to me as how I came to be there. No—the subject of this memory is the painted care with which I remember the damp, naked feathers, the crepuscular field, autumn. The passing headlights and the way everything around me shifted to their moving eyes. I remember twisting its wings. On the map of my childhood I can pinpoint the exact coordinates at which I understood death—standing in ghosty grass, arms up, flinging the damned thing upward in hopes that it will catch the wind. The creature, a common Turdus merula, likely newly fledged, stayed still. Obscene eyes. Yellow beak. Feathers greasy and more black in the sunset. Then I’d done something I can neither remember or understand, and suddenly the bird disappeared. (Magic. A professor explained to me later in the most sterile of words. I dangled my feet on the too-high cornice of the chair in his office. The kind that flared in children who can evoke it, changing and calming in substance until some criticality, at which point magic becomes decidedly dangerous.) By the next full moon I remembered wings. Even without them I would have been an awkward child; my parents sought for a cure, and found from chest X-ray photography (obliviate being an easy spell) that my scapulas were held tenuously to two outgrowing appendages. They never tried for surgery. My mother was muggle but not stupid. These were the seeds of a curse, the prints of magic. Watered by whatever power a full moon claims heritage, they would grow into full vines shot through the intricate lacework of my skeleton, bending and threading, breaking and sowing. And the skin would raise scarlet red, sear like needlework, and feathers would bind themselves to me like glue. Sticky. Uncomfortable.  
  
.  
  
And sometimes I remember flying. Or have dreamt of, that much remains uncertain.  
  
I have long stopped convincing myself that I made up the initial incident, the clotting smell of blood, the emergency of night crawling up on me. I have no other memories. I have only two, poignant as they are, only two. I have tried to fly again and again, tight-roping on branches into the lake. Later, shadowed attempts in the guise of the city, over skyscrapers and clotheslines. I could not afford acrophobia. I’d swoop down and magic would save me from the ground.  
  
*  
  
The second memory is the same way connected, eleven years after. Sirius Black, roommate to this awkward boy, knew, like the two others who shared the room, why the boy spent some nights away. And I knew they knew, so it was time’s game. He had followed me. I had not been careful. I think I was deliberate in that. On the forest floor of the small glen I’d arched and turned. Lumos was bright by the tip of his wand. I was drawn to the light. Like any other night there was pain as my back realigned. The night snapped to place. I smiled. He asked (whispered, voice melancholy, lively) if I could fly like this, and I informed the negative. I could not. There were no muscles that would bow these wings back, no lightness in my bones, no lifting that can accomplish such feat. I tipped my head back. The stars were glowing, in that pale, tender way they do sometimes. Suddenly I felt light, in that way newness does sometimes. A breeze winked through the waters, making patterns and feathers and hair meander. His arm was nether-pale. When he reached toward the wings they were almost blue. He spoke in a voice frantic and soft.  
  
.  
  
I felt the pulse in my neck on his finger. Then lips. The ground was soft and newly autumn, soothing skin, dissipating heat, giving surrogate life to flesh. The wings twitched as muscle untrained were pressed loose. Afterwards he made maps of the bones of those wings—touching could not have described the way he had traced them, hands like an anatomist’s. I sprawled backward, and clenched my knuckles. Moving in that way I had first become aware of my fingers and the sensations pain had robbed from me. Awkward.  
  
Half-functioning, half-pulsing with the anatomy of flight.  
  



End file.
